Teaching programming h;lp

I'm going to teach programming to somebody who's going to study it more formally in a year, but wants to be learning part of it in the mean time.

What SIMPLE, CLEAN, STRUCTURED language would you recommend me to use for teaching? Please, refrain from language wars as this is not a fanboy thread but a serious question. Before yuo mention it, I'm not going to start with either Python or Ruby because they're too complex and get too much in the way, and no, I'm not stupid enough to start with Java because a radical OO language (and a crappy one at that) with a shitty enterprise API is not the best either.

I'm thinking Pascal. As much as it sucks, it has strict/anal types (it's better to start anal than to start easy-going and botch it), simple yet not messy syntax, simple stdin/stdout input and output to play with (that's all I'll need), and none of the complexity of OO. Yet it sounds so useless. But I don't know of other languages that meet these requirements.

>>33 & >>29
Ever written x86 asm?

Pascal-style involves moving the number of bytes (or words if you want it to go faster) into ecx, then doing a rep movs* (the stos* family is stone-age). This is as fast as you can possibly get.

Null-terminated strings on x86 (and every other modern architecture) involves a comparison per byte (or word if you get fancy). Does this sound faster to you? Because it's a lot slower.